Open Heart (45 page)

It was true that thoughts of the return to Israel were already occupying my mind during our first few hours in London, where we disembarked into a gray, rainy day. The idea that from now on, because of the unfamiliarity of our surroundings, I would have to cling more closely to Michaela added a disturbing note. Sir Geoffrey himself came to meet us at the airport. He was a rather elderly red-haired Englishman who had remained
stubbornly
loyal and devoted to Israel in spite of its unpopular
policies
. It was difficult at first to understand what he was saying, partly because he swallowed his words and partly because of
their subtle, often baffling irony. I wondered how Lazar, with his primitive English, had succeeded in establishing such friendly
relations
with him. Although he was the administrative head of the hospital, he did not seem to enjoy Lazar’s absolute authority. His executive style was apparently more diffident and hesitant. For example, when we arrived at the hospital, he couldn’t even find a janitor to help us with our suitcases, and he dragged one of them with his own hands into the guest room, which was attached to one of the hospital departments and had been allocated to us for the first week of our stay, until we found a flat. For a moment, when we saw a nurses’ station with an old respirator standing next to it at the end of the corridor, we thought that Sir Geoffrey intended to hospitalize us, but as soon as we entered the room itself the hospital was forgotten. It was a charming, old-
fashioned
room, with a kind of canopy of green material over the high bedstead to make sleep sweeter and more secure. In days gone by the room had been occupied by the nobles and
aristocrats
among the patients, but it was now used by the hospital’s guests, especially those who came for short stays, to conduct seminars or supervise complicated treatments.

A dark-skinned old nurse came in to offer us a cup of tea. We were happy to accept, especially since the forms Sir Geoffrey had brought with him still lacked a number of administrative details, which he was anxious to fill in with our help. He examined my British passport carefully and then turned to the notarized
translation
of our marriage certificate, stamped and sealed with a red wax rose, to extract the details, which he needed to establish Michaela’s status and obtain British citizenship for her, or at least the right to reside in the country and be legally employed. She herself was completely at ease. She took off her shoes and lay down on one of the little sofas in the room, fixing her wonderful, shining eyes with great goodwill on Sir Geoffrey, who would no doubt have been astonished at the ferocity of the lust aroused in this strange young woman by the cold, dim, foreign room—a lust that would oblige me, travel-weary and slightly depressed as I was, to perform my conjugal duties as soon as he left the room. But in the meantime the tea was brought, and in honor of
England
I decided to drink it as my parents did, with milk. After Sir Geoffrey had finished filling in the forms and folded them up and screwed on the top of his fountain pen, I began to question him
about the different departments in the hospital, especially the surgical department, and I told him about my experience as a surgeon, and recently also as an anesthetist, and asked him
hesitantly
whether I might be able to take part in an operation from time to time. “Yes,” Sir Geoffrey replied. Lazar had spoken to him on the phone a couple of days before and told him about the true professional inclinations of the young doctor from Israel, and had also asked him if it would be possible to find a part-time job for his wife, and Sir Geoffrey had begun work right away to fulfill his friend’s request. But although the head of the internal medicine department had been willing to do without the services of the Israeli doctor, the head of surgery had no room for
another
doctor. The emergency room, however, would be happy to have an extra pair of hands, and there too, of course, emergency operations were performed, which were sometimes no less
complex
than those performed in the surgical department itself. If that was what I really wanted, there was nothing to prevent me from joining their team, either as a surgeon or as an anesthetist, as I wished.

“So he can be a little happy at last,” said Michaela in English, in a quiet but mildly rebuking tone, and she went on to explain to Sir Geoffrey how passionately I wanted to stand next to the operating table. Though her English was very basic, she spoke in a correct British accent, which she must have picked up in India, and without a trace of an Israeli accent. Sir Geoffrey listened to her with undisguised interest, apparently spellbound by her great, shining eyes, which added a note of brilliance to the dull gray light in the big room. I was still marveling at Lazar’s phone call. Was it simply one more sign of his kindheartedness and concern, or had the hand of my beloved been secretly at work here, to seduce me by means of my surgical ambitions into
prolonging
my stay in England, or at least to remove any thoughts of an early return? Indeed, I may not have been as happy as Michaela expected yet, but I was definitely pleased and full of hope. The thought that I would soon be allowed to hold a scalpel in my hand and to cut into living flesh in an atmosphere of quiet English politeness, without being exposed to the mocking
scrutiny
of Hishin or the jealous looks of my rival, excited me so much that I was too late to step in and prevent Michaela from unhesitatingly accepting Sir Geoffrey’s offer of a job as a glorified
cleaning lady in the little chapel attached to the hospital. The idea of Michaela’s doing physical work during her pregnancy, and what’s more in a church attached to the hospital where I was working as a doctor, was not at all to my liking, but I held my tongue in order not to embarrass her in front of Sir Geoffrey, who at long last took his leave of us, very pleased with himself at having met the needs of the Israelis he so admired with such unprecedented speed and efficiency.

I began to unpack the suitcase we had prepared in advance with everything we would need for the transition period, until we found a suitable apartment. Michaela took the Indian statue that Einat had given her out of her knapsack and put it on a little shelf above the bed, where she saluted it with a bow. Then she suggested that we lie down to rest for a while on the big bed before we finished unpacking. But I didn’t feel tired, and I didn’t want our clothes to become even more wrinkled in the suitcase. She took off her sweater and her socks and undid the buttons of her jeans to relieve the pressure on her stomach, which according to her had already begun to swell a little. Then she sprawled out on the bed, waiting for me to finish putting our things away in the capacious wardrobes and join her. Her eyelids began to droop, and I knew that she was charging her batteries with the lust radiated by the big, strange room. But I didn’t feel the faintest desire for sex. I was tired from the journey and excited by the surgical prospects that had opened out before me. “I can’t now, Michaela,” I announced when I saw her stretching out her arms to me with her eyes closed. But she didn’t give up, and with her usual shamelessness she got up, took off all her clothes, lay down again, naked and shivering on the bedspread, which didn’t look very clean to me, and said, “Then come and warm me up at least—are you capable of that?” And even though I had no wish to warm her up, I didn’t want to hurt her feelings either,
especially
since I knew how important it was to her to make love in new places, as a sure way of dispelling anxiety and domesticating the unknown. But when I went to make sure that the door was properly shut, I saw that it didn’t have a lock or a key but only a slender chain, which made it possible for others to open it
slightly and peep in—perhaps to prevent the patients or the
medical
staff from using the room for illegitimate purposes. “Can’t we leave it now?” I said imploringly, afraid not only of an
unexpected
visitor but also of a cry or moan which might alarm any patients wandering around in the corridor. But Michaela refused to leave it. She was burning with desire. “Don’t be such a
coward
,” she said, and pulled me down next to her, taking my head firmly between her hands and placing it first between her breasts and then on her belly, and finally between her legs, so that my tongue could give her the pleasure my prick was too weak to provide. And then there was a light knock at the door, which opened as far as the chain would permit to reveal for a second the blushing face of Sir Geoffrey, who had forgotten to give us the list of apartments for rent in the area which his secretary had drawn up for us. He was too embarrassed even to apologize, and left the list stuck on the door. But later that evening, when we met for supper in the hospital dining room, he seemed even friendlier than before, as if the scene that had flashed before his startled eyes had only confirmed his view of the dynamic,
energetic
nature of the typical Israeli.

And in fact we both showed plenty of dynamism and energy in the initial stages of our acclimatization, which succeeded more than we could have hoped, perhaps partly because my correct English accent, which I had been making efforts to improve ever since our arrival by remembering my father’s speech and taking it as an example, inspired the confidence of the real estate agents and the car salesmen. After only two days we found a suitable apartment for a reasonable rent a short distance from the
hospital
. The apartment consisted of two large, comfortable rooms, enough to accommodate my parents comfortably during the day but not enough for them to settle in. The small secondhand car we bought also seemed clean and in good running order. And even though I was not officially entitled to a parking place in the hospital lot, which was reserved for the senior staff, Michaela, who had established a slightly ironic, good-humored form of communication of her own with Sir Geoffrey, succeeded in
getting
permission for us to park in the backyard of the little chapel, which freed us from the need to look for parking places—a daunting task, especially at night, when the area was packed with cars. It was mainly Michaela who used the car, and her
knowledge
of the streets of London became more intimate and precise from day to day. Although I didn’t like the growing proximity between her stomach and the steering wheel as her pregnancy advanced, and I warned her constantly not only to use the seat belt, which she sometimes forgot to do, but also to drive slowly, which was almost an impossibility for her, I had no alternative but to honor her independence and trust her good sense, even when she began haunting the seedy areas inhabited by
immigrants
from the Far East in an effort to renew contact with her beloved Hindus. I had to rely on her increasingly obvious
pregnancy
to protect her from harassment. I knew that she had only four months of liberty left until the baby was born, while I
myself
was being completely swept up in the work at the hospital, which filled me not only with enthusiasm but also with anxiety.

In order to give validity and prestige to the exchange
agreement
between himself and Lazar, Sir Geoffrey introduced me to all the doctors in the emergency room as an experienced surgeon and anesthetist. My experience as a military doctor also gave me special authority in his eyes. After only one week, before I had time to learn the names and places of the instruments in the little operating room or acquaint myself with the contents of the
medicine
cabinets, I was summoned to assist at the operation of a small, dark-skinned girl of about ten who had sustained severe stomach injuries in a road accident. Just as the operation was getting started, the senior physician was called to treat another victim of the same accident, who had suffered a heart attack, and without asking any questions, in complete confidence, he gave me the scalpel and asked me to go ahead and conclude the
operation
, during the course of which it proved necessary to remove the damaged spleen. And so I found myself standing alone in front of the delicate, long-limbed body of a cut and bruised little girl who had just been too vigorously anesthetized and seemed to be losing her pulse. The nurse assisting me was young and seemed inexperienced, but the physician in charge of the
anesthesia
was an elderly, white-haired woman who inspired my
confidence
. At first I imagined that there wasn’t enough light in the room, because I couldn’t see everything I wanted to see inside the deep, open stomach. Perhaps the child’s dark skin confused me. But after the nurse tried in vain to increase the light over the operating table, she offered me a little headlamp to strap onto
my forehead, like the ones coal miners wear in the movies when they descend into the bowels of the earth. And I felt a little like a miner, bending down and delving into the depths of internal
organs
which for the first time in my life were my exclusive
responsibility
.